David Stockman Slams The GOP Tax Bill: "Fuggedaboutit!!"

The GOP has become so politically desperate that they might as well enact a two-word statute and be done with it. It would simply read: Tax Bill!

Actually, that's not far from where they are in the great scheme of things. The Senate Finance Committee's bill is a dog's breakfast of K-Street/Wall Street pleasing tax cuts, narrowly focused revenue raisers that will be subject to withering attack on the Senate floor, nonsensical vote-driven compromises and outrageous fiscal gimmicks----the most blatant of which is the sun-setting of every single individual tax provision after 2025.

This latter trick is designed to shoe-horn the revenue loss into the $1.5 trillion 10-year allowance in the budget reconciliation instruction and also comply with the Senate's "Byrd Rule" which allows a point of order to strike down a reconciliation bill that increases the deficit after year 10. Save for these gimmicks, the actual 10-year cost of the Senate bill would be $2.2 trillionincluding interest on the added deficits.

Nevertheless, this and other sunset gimmicks also underscore how threadbare the whole undertaking has become. To wit, the bill provides interim, deficit-financed tax relief of $1.38 trillion during 2018-2025 before these budget gimmicks kick-in, which is not a big number in the scheme of things: it amounts to just 4.2% of current law revenue collections during the eight year period, and only 0.8% of GDP.

Since the bill doesn't even really cut marginal rates during this interim period (the top bracket drops from 39.6% to 38.5%), its hard to see how a mere 0.8% "stimulus" to GDP is going to incite a tsunami of growth and jobs.

As we have frequently pointed out, the Reagan tax cut of 1981---which had no measureable effect on the trend rate of economic growth--- slashed marginal rates from 70% to 50% and as a total package paled the current Senate Plan into insignificance: It reduced the Federal revenue base by 26%, not 4.2%;and it amounted to 6.2%of GDP, not 0.8%, when fully effective in the later 1980s.

Moreover, the "fully effective" part is especially salient because the Senate bill's impact does not widen with time, as do most permanent tax cuts which require phase-in periods, but, instead, shrinks into virtual insignificance.

Thus, the bill's net tax cut amounts to $225 billionor 1.1% of GDP in 2019, but by 2022 the net cut shrinks to $199 billionand 0.9% of GDP---and then to just $145 billionor 0.6% of GDP in 2025 when the sunset gimmick kicks in.

Thereafter the bill becomes a small net revenue raiser ($31 billion) by 2027, but, more importantly, the single "cut" item left in the statute tells you who is really driving the show. That is, the Business Roundtable, the K-Street industry lobbies and Wall Street get to keep what they mobilized for----the 20% corporate rate cut, which stays in place permanently at a cost of $171 billionin 2027 revenue loss.

However, the lopsided math laid out in the Tax Policy Center's price-out of the Finance Committee reported bill underscores why this dog's breakfast will never make it close to the Donald's desk. That's because by year #10 not one of the 150 million individual filers get a tax cut; the reduction for small business "pass-thru" payers is zeroed-out; and the balance of the bill consists of an incredible $202 billion of tax increases in 2027 compared to current law.

That's right. The great Republican "tax cut" slithers off the stage in 2027 raising taxes by a net of $75 billionon individual filers, $123 billionon business filers (aside from the corporate rate cut) and $4 billionon international companies.

So what you have is a sharply downward sloping taper of tax cuts and revenue losses, which makes the bill a classic Keynesian deficit stimulus through the tax code, not a supply side incentive driver; and one so tangled up in the nation's fiscal strait-jacket that it ends up in political la la land.

For instance, the only individual tax provision that is not subject to the 2025 sunset is the tax indexing modification which relies on a shorter ruler to adjust the brackets and standard deduction for inflation. Accordingly, by 2027 approximately 150 million filers will be paying $32 billionper year in higher taxes!

Another fiscal anomaly contained in the bill in order to shoe-horn it into the allotted $1.5 trillion deficit add-on is the repeal of the individual mandate under ObamaCare.

To be sure, as a matter of policy and liberty we would be the first to say, right on!

But here is how the bill reduces the deficit by $53 billion in 2027 and $318 billion over the 10 year period. To wit, it assumes that about 13 million citizens are being forced to join Medicaid or buy subsidized health insurance policies on the ObamaCare exchanges who do not want them, and don't even need the coverage, apparently.

That's completely crazy, of course, but is also par for the course in today's American Welfare State and the fiscal impact and analysis thereof.

Indeed, the intuitive notion would be that repeal of the ObamaCare fines would cause an increasein the deficit, and, in fact, the CBO analysis assumes a $43 billionrevenue loss over the 10-year period from uninsured individuals no longer being forced to pay fines to Uncle Sam for exercising their right to self-insure, pay cash for care or go without.

Still, the repeal provision is projected to net $318 billion of "payfors" because a different set of needy people are presumed to reject mandatory welfare.

That's right. The CBO projects that Medicaid costs will be $29 billionlower than current law in 2027 and $179 billionlower over the 10-year period because millions of low income citizens---and this is hard to type with a straight face----would otherwise sign up for Medicaid, which they would be qualified for but don't want, in order to avoid paying a fine!

Stated differently, CBO essentially assumes that millions of low income citizens are being fined into enrolling in Medicaid when they don't want Uncle Sam's free stuff; and that millions more would give up their ObamaCare tax subsidies of up to $15,000 because they no longer would have to pay a fine of about $2,000.

You can't make this stuff up---but there is a reason for the apparent lunacy. What is going on here, in fact, is that 30 years of fiscal kick-the-can is coming home to roost.

The overhang of $10 trillionof additional built-in deficits over the next decade, and a prospective public debt of $31 trillionis tying the GOP tax-writers in knots, and well it should.

That's because a meaningful tax cut not paid for with spending cuts (preferably) or a more benign revenue raiser like VAT or a consumption levy is simply unaffordable and counter-productive.

A deficit-financed tax cut will result in "crowding out" and higher interest rates in the years ahead----meaning headwinds to growth, not enhancements. That's because for the first time since the 1980s the Fed and other central banks will be sellinggovernment debt, not buying it; they will be in a demonetization and QT (quantitative tightening) mode rather than one of massive monetization and QE.

Yet it was only the latter which permitted the fiscal profligacy that quadrupled the public debt since the turn of the century (from $5 trillionto $21 trillion) to roll forward year after year unchecked by visible, adverse financial and macroeconomic effects. Now comes the payback.

Indeed, given the nation's rapidly aging and welfare-consuming demographics, its $66 trillionalbatross of public and private debt on a sputtering $19 trillioneconomy and Washington's 5%of GDP structural deficit during the next decade even under CBO's nirvana of perpetual full-employment, the very idea of an unfinanced tax cut amounts to what Senate Leader Howard Baker called a "riverboat gamble" back in 1981.

And that get's us the most absurd twist yet in the GOP's futile attempt to fit it's big fat political foot into the purported golden slipper of tax reduction and reform. It happens that Senator Baker's legatee representing Tennessee in the US Senate, the now retiring Bob Corker, has exactly the same concern as his illustrious predecessor.

Namely, the objectively warranted fear that tax cuts do not pay for themselves----and most especially in the case of the dog's breakfast now heading toward the Senate floor. Indeed, Corker has explicitly stated that he will vote "no" on any bill that increases the Federal deficit----after any favorable impact on economic growth and the revenue feedback therefrom.

Apparently, the good Senator is not at all convinced that the sole permanent beneficiary of the Senate bill---corporate America----will use most of its $1.35 trillion in increased after-tax cash flow over the next decade in order to invest in domestic plant, equipment and technology. And in sufficient incremental quantities to generate meaningful revenue reflow.

The skunk in the woodpile here, in fact, is that Corker has been a long-time member of the budget committee and reasonably consistent deficit hawk (except on defense where he is a raging war hawk and spender). Accordingly, he is actually numerate and understands the forbidding math of the corporate tax cut.

To wit, at the permanent 20% rate, the tax cuts would have to generate nearly $7 trillionof incremental pre-tax profits to pay for itself; and given the pre-tax profit share at 12% of national income, the total gain in GDP would need to be in the order of $60 trillion!

At the same time, the corporate C-suites already face the lowest debt and equity costs in history thanks to decades of radical financial repression by the Fed, on the one hand, and are now addicted to financial engineering, on the other. So it is not unreasonable to assume that at least 65% of the corporate rate reduction will be allocated to higher dividends and stock buybacks.

In short, to pay for itself, the 20% corporate tax rate would need to generate $60 trillionof incremental GDP over the next decade from perhaps $500 billionof incremental investment. That is to say, a 120Xyield on investment in an economy that has actually not been acutely deprived of investment dollars over the last decade.

In the alternative, of course, added investment might also generate some incremental employment and income and payroll tax revenue. But that would likely be a strictly second order effect: Hardly a single CEO at a recent meeting with Gary Cohn raised his hand when asked with the 20% rate would lead to more jobs or higher wages.

Undoubtedly, Senator Corker (and his fellow deficit hawks including Flake, Lankford and others) will lean hard toward the most favorable assumptions possible about the share of the corporate cut that will be reinvested rather than distributed to shareholders, and the yield of GDP and pre-tax corporate income which will result therefrom.

But they will not get close to a 100% "payfor" conclusion---so they have invented in new morsel to throw into the Senate dog's breakfast. Namely, a "tax cut" written in disappearing ink or what they are pleased to called a "trigger-tax" increase in the event that the dynamic reflow assumptions do not pan out.

"Corker, the retiring Tennessee Republican has staked a hard line against letting tax legislation add to federal deficits - saying that a single penny of new deficits would lose his vote. It turns out the Senate bill would add $1.4 trillion to the deficit over 10 years - at least before accounting for any economic growth - according to a Congressional Budget Office report released Sunday.

The bill’s supporters say it’ll boost economic growth enough to cover that shortfall, but Corker says he’s not satisfied. He wants a backstop mechanism - essentially a tax-increase trigger that would raise revenue in case the promised growth doesn’t result. Arizona’s Flake and Oklahoma’s Lankford also support that kind of trigger.

Needless to say, the crafting of a trigger-tax is beyond the capacity of the US Senate to devise while in full partisan floor battle or at any other time.

The problem is, what is the baseline for measuring any revenue shortfall, and what happens if the short-fall is due to a recession or some other un-programmed economic development? Or even a multi-quarter growth hiatus that may or may not be the on-set of an officially designated "recession" by the authorities at the NBER.

You editor speaks with some authority on this point---having helped devise such a "trigger tax" back in 1983 when Ronald Reagan was looking for a way to raise taxes to stem the exploding deficit caused by the 1981 cut without admitting he was back-tracking. The long and short of it was Reagan's "trigger tax" never got off the ground because even the threat of a trigger release causes it own set of adverse but impossible to quantify economic feedbacks.

Even then, the Senate bill has not yet begun to fix all the other "problems" that would be required to find the 51-votes.

For instance, Senators Johnson and Daines---both former small businessmen and "pass-thru" tax payers----are holding out for a better deal for the millions of small business owners who won't benefit from the K-Street/Wall Street driven cut in the corporate rate.

As presently written, pass thru payers would face a 30% rate on qualifying business income rather than 20%, and that's only until 2025. After that they get zip---even as the corporate rate remains permanent.

The problem with the "fix" needed for these two Senate votes, of course, is that even the 30% pass-thru rate costs $25 billionper year and there is no room in the fiscal envelope.

Likewise, the latest distributional analysis shows that in 2025---before the sunset---the bottom 30 million tax filers would get an average "tax cut" which amounts to the grand sum of $1.15 per week----and, no, we did not omit any zeros.

Similarly, the next 30 million filers would only get $7 per week; and the middle quintile----the 30 million tax filers between $55,00 and $95,000 per year and the heart of the middle class----- would get just $17 per week of tax reliefin 2025.

That is, before it all disappears into the sunset!

As we said, the GOP might better pass a two-word tax bill and be done with it.

Better still, it might consider the possibility that the great barrier to growth in America today is not the tax code, but the Fed and its massive inducements for speculation on Wall Street, rather than investment and growth on main street.

Indeed, given the warm welcome that most GOP Senators are giving to the new Fed Chairman----that is, Janet Yellen in a tie and trousers---that avenue of inquiry is more than warranted.

As we will argue tomorrow, US taxes are always too high and should be cut along with parallel reductions in spending and the deficit. But short of that, it is hard to say that American producers struggle under some kind of severe competitive disadvantage in the global economy.

In fact, only Ireland, Chile and Mexico have lower tax burdens among all OECD countries, and the US rate at 26% of GDP is actually one-fourth lower than the OECD average.

Well they are paying a whopping 9% of all taxes collected by the US government. Let's not forget all those no bid contracts and subsidies companies like Amazon for one gets from the USPS. Raytheon, Boeing, Big Pharma can't negotiate welfare queens one and all.So in reality many corporations don't pay shit as they pass along the cost or live off government cheese already.

Your theory is right but your facts are wrong. The problem as it concerns illegal immigration is not minimum wage. It is free school for illegal immigrants' children, and welfare and free healthcare for illegal immigrants. Technically, no illegal immigrant is entitled to minimum wage because it illegal to employ them. But it is perfectly legal to give their children free schooling and their parents free healthcare and other handouts.

The main motive of every border brother I've known is the fake arbitrage produced by every minimum wage law I've seen. School? They don't want to learn, they only want to drag us down. Check it out. Don't go to the places where they clean up and lie and beg to scam the squares, go to the street and see the real.

You lost me at Bob Corker - and the fact that fudge packer screams about fiscal discipline after 8 years and 10 trillion dollars of govt deficit he participated in. That's a kabuki theater for master insider trader/SEC cheat.

Bob, Jeff, etc found god after announcing retirement. This is a perfect example of why we need term limits...and no follow thru Lobbying jobs. Perhaps quid pro quo would decrease and forthright legislation would follow.

Yeah, let's just keep things the way they are; which is why the Rino's will pass nothing.Why do you think they couldn't pass a repeal of Obamacare?Deficit? Funny how that wasn't a matter for the bailouts.It's all down the river, a mass of manure, fill your pails!C'mon Serfs! We can do it! Fi$cal Re$pon$bility!You pay, they collect! Do Not Pass Go!All hail the Kelptoligarchy!

Jezuz Christ, David, everyone knows we passed "way too late" at least 8 exits back. Would you please just chill the fuck out and enjoy the ride aready? I assure you, no matter how much you bitch about it you will NOT be given a refund at the end.

Ok, so last I saw here on ZH is that ... McStain is going to save us (or not) - being the last senator to decide one way or the other and seal the fate as it were.I think his vote will be the proof in the pudding - it he is for it - it is probably horribly bad for us. Trump is doing politics (and let's face it - he has a lot of rich friends).That said, I dig Stockman, but I posted under you because this SHIT SHOW really is that far down the line. Why f**king bother anymore.Regards,Cooter

Just fuck off and die already ... wages haven't increased after 4 decades of rimjobbing multi national corporations with tax loopholes, creating the lowest effective corporate tax rate in history ... but just a little moar should do the trick, right ?

You obviously learned economics somewhere south of Lenin and north of Stalin. TAXATION IS THEFT Black and white, plain as day. Some other person has no right to my income. Period. But as long as we all decide theft is okay, how far away is legalized killing of infants and letting the state maim, cage, and kills it's citizens at will. Just food for thought I guess. We all pretty much on the commie train now. sean

Proper use of taxation is necessary to produce a civil society. Corruption in any form makes the bathwater stink. Too many people to be governed fairly. So, all your money is not yours...or don't drive on my roads.

Stockman is correct. The GOP Tax Bill is minimal tailoring of the same old, bad suit.This unnecessarily compromised Tax Bill will backfire on the GOPe... selling this Bill as "reform" is insulting, and voters will take offence to the backslapping & victory lap grins... getting rid ot the SALT deductions is a nice, little, tiny victory, but it won't move the needle economically or electorally. such inconsequential attempts at legislation barely qualify as governing at all. if they are going to waste time doing nothing, then the least they could do is do nothing more cheaply... you know, shrink or constrain gov't. but no... Ryan & McConnell have pledged to pass only "revenue neutral" legislation that guarantees gov't can never shrink, only grow. these guys call themselves 'conservatives'. no, really, they say it outloud w/ a straight face... The GOPe could've easily passed a tax bill that truly reforms the US tax code - crafting such reform isn't difficult - but the GOPe chose the cowardly path here, declining the mantle of leadership given to them last November. voters recognize & remember this sort of passive, deceitful cowardice. the GOPe won't get any credit for trying here... voters have noticed that 'trying' in DC looks & smells a lot like betrayal.

Hello all, new here but have been following for a bit. To put is simply we starve the beast.Boycott the Tax man.Make them work for our money. We as a people have been turned into sheep. If half of the people stood up and boycotted the tax man the IRS would Melt down. How could they investigate, prosocute, and enfoce the confiscation of 200 million people in one year? Having delt with the IRS on trivial matters they are required currently by law to give you a hearing for any grievence, which will stay any and all levy, siezure powers they have, until the case is heard in Tax court. How long will it take for them to process 200 million cases ? my two pennies.

“The world will soon wake up to the reality that everyone is broke... and of course...you can NOT collect...from the bankrupt... who are owed unlimited amounts by the insolvent... with an unacceptable and worthless currency... against defaulted and "hypothicated-rehypothicated"...collateral...too which nobody is sure who holds title or its worth.”- >>>>>>> its just math now <<<<<<<<<dollar panic>>>>>> the value to zero <<<<<<<<<>>>>and soon every one will know <<<<<<<then dollar panic >>>> dollar value to Zero<<<<<<and THAT IS THE END <<<<<<< Factors 1. Revenues intake over tme 2. Interst on the debt 3. Inflation 4. Total debt5. GDP 6. % on 10 year Bond 7. Adv % interest rate Over time I beleive that there are certain math rules that can NOT be violated for any hope of recovery ... 1. when IOD exceeds total revenues ... 2. When % rates (10 year bond) ... are below 5% (time factor) 3. When total national debt exceeds $50T 4. When infation exceeds GDP % growth 5. When Deficits exceed 33% of Revenues 6. When deographics hender rather then help7. When we remove "God's money"

Bend over USA, you are about to get a very large rectal intrusion under the euphemism of "income tax reform", which will further impoverish you, courtesy of your democratically elected leaders, including windbag-in-chief Trump.Isn't democracy wonderful !!!!!